Israel's Broza sets words by Townes Van Zandt to music

David Broza and Townes Van Zandt met only twice. The second time was briefly at the Kerrville Folk Festival. The first time was at the Main Street Theater in Houston in 1994, when they traded songs for nearly four hours. Broza knew only a little about the legendary Texas songwriter at the time, and he's certain Van Zandt knew next to nothing about him. But a mutual friend and fan of both wanted them to share the stage. Sixteen years later, Broza has a new album called Night Dawn, featuring previously unrecorded writings by Van Zandt.

Broza says Night Dawn was the result of a common cultural practice in Israel, where he's from. "It's very much a tradition and very common to use local poetry and popularize it through music," Broza says. "I told him about the process, and I think he was turned on by the idea. I talked about the challenges of working with one poet I knew. And he said, 'I write poetry. And I have a good sense of rhythm and melody. Take my number.' "

They didn't have a chance to collaborate, as Van Zandt died on the first day of 1997.

Broza says shortly before Van Zandt's death he dictated a poem to the mutual friend who had booked that Houston show two years earlier with instructions to pass it along to Broza; she told him there were numerous other poems. Broza eventually called Van Zandt's widow, Jeanine, and asked about them. She asked for some time to feel out some musicians more famous in the States, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan among them, and see if they'd like to do something with the lyrics.

"I completey understood, I was humbled by the whole situation," Broza says. "I knew if it was meant to happen, it would happen. For it to work you have to have total support and trust on both sides. That's the nature of art. It's not a war zone. It's from the heart."

Broza "tried to forget about it for eight years," but a return trip to Houston prompted him to call Jeanine in Nashville. He returned to Tel Aviv, and in November 2005 he began receiving e-mail from her with Van Zandt's verse.

The process is labored for Broza, though opener Soul to Soul came to him quickly at a hotel in New York early one morning. "I picked up the guitar, and it just came out," he says. "No tape, no phone to record it. I just trusted the song to stay with me.

"But usually I have to live with these poems. Nothing happens on the spot." But over three-and-a-half years he assembled music for a dozen songs, one an instrumental that Broza dedicated to Van Zandt.

The words are full of Van Zandt's tightly coiled writing, full of far-flung places and references to love and isolation.

"I tend to get dark and I tend to go far," Broza sings, "as far as the nearest Wyoming bar."

For a guy who talks of putting the works of Federico Garc¿a Lorca to music, Broza says he struggled a little at first with the sound for Night Dawn. "I've never done anything that had such an American flavor," he says. "I've done things with blues or country or gospel, but of course I'd do it in Hebrew or Spanish."

It was singing a blues song in Hebrew that he says captured Van Zandt's attention at the Main Street Theater.

"I don't remember who started that night," Broza says, "but it was obvious he didn't know what to expect. He had that expression of 'What the hell was that?' He wanted to know more about Hebrew and the music scene where I was from. So I told him. It was a night full of storytelling. It was his turn, so he sang a song and talked about the blues."